Eight good things I ate in August

Surrealist butter, Taiwanese pork and a festival pie

I published a few stories last month and had planned to keep up the writing on here and my wine blog but oops, the end of the month has arrived and I see I’ve got a bit behind with it. In my defence, I’ve been out galavanting a lot, playing festivals and gigs with my indie punk band The Empty Page.

I’ve also been absolutely snowed under with Manchester Wine Tours which is really ramping up as I get close to celebrating one year in business. On top of that, I’ve had some very welcome paid writing commissions for Time Out and a couple of other publications. It’s been hectic.

I’ve been eating out too, friends, don’t you worry.

Here are the best things I ate in August.

Cauliflower cheese pie, mash and gravy from Barnaby Sykes Piemaker at Kendal Calling (£12)

Let’s start with the best thing I ate at Kendal Calling by a country mile. I remember the food at my first festivals in the 90s with a grimace. Pre-smartphones and even the internet, word had to get around in other ways and yet it was well understood that to eat pretty much anything from a food truck at Monsters Of Rock Donington was a grave mistake. People lived off water and energy bars, I think. Oh, and drugs.

These days things are very different and you can get sushi and a glass of English sparkling at some of the more wanky festivals. Yet I very often feel short-changed and hungry. Not so with this fantastic lunch. After a morning of lugging band equipment and playing a gig in a tent, the ole blood sugar was waning. Yet despite being peak hangry, I chose well. This beautiful handcrafted cauli cheese pie on a mound of buttery mash with proper gravy sorted me out. Would also eat this not at a festival.

Chilli butter (and milk loaf) at The Cedar Tree, Farlam Hall Cumbria (Part of a £130 tasting menu)

After a weekend of sleeping in a tent and playing festivals with my band, the timing couldn’t have been better to be invited on a luxury press trip to Farlam Hall. Sleeping in the massive Disney cloud of a bed was even more of a treat after a few nights of trying to adjust my tired body around the large pointy rock we’d positioned our tent over.

This hotel is a stunner. The drinks, the food, the hospitality - all exceptional (more on that soon) and this chilli butter is one of the best things I have ever eaten.

If you know me, you know that most of my favourite food comes from the Indian Subcontinent. And that I love a tasting menu. And that I love a bit of surrealism. And that I love butter. So here, like Penny Crayon has conjured it up just for me, is the dish of my dreams. Fermented butter is flavoured with green chilli (my fave) and coriander, painstakingly crafted into an eerily realistic chilli shape, drizzled with smoked chilli oil and served with the bread equivalent of that Disney cloud bed. We all wept. I’ll never forget it. You can see a video of this chilli butter on my TikTok page here.

Beef ‘Wellington’ with tandoori spices at The Cedar Tree, Farlam Hall Cumbria (part of a £130 tasting menu)

As much as I love a tasting menu, I get it when people baulk at the portion sizes. I’m a northern lass and I have a hearty appetite so when this main dish of Beef Wellington landed on the table I was impressed by its generosity of size. Bear in mind this is the centrepiece of a tasting menu with around six other courses, plus multiple snacks and petit fours. The impeccably sourced, local beef is flavoured with Indian spices but otherwise prepared in the classic way with mushroom duxelles, pancakes and puff pastry. For me, it’s a stunning improvement on the original, cooked to perfection and without overdoing it on the tinkering. Mega impressive stuff.

Iberico Collar at The Beeswing (£12.50)

I go to The Beeswing regularly with my wine tours. It’s got a fantastic, ever-changing wine list alongside a short menu of tapas by Baratxuri. I’d somehow not tried this dish before though. A Georgian wine tasting from Sarah Abbott MW to the rescue. The tasting was super informative (more on those wines in my wine blog when I catch up with it) and the wines were served with dishes to match. This is not the norm for trade tastings but I think all wine tastings should have food because that’s how we usually enjoy wine. Anyway, this Iberico pork is braised in a rich red wine pork stock, drizzled with treacly pomegranate molasses and served over garlic-heavy crushed chickpeas, kind of like a rough hummus. I’m a big fan of a warm pulse mash and the intense flavour of the pork melded with its chickpea companion so beautifully. I thought this dish went superbly with some of the more cidery orange wines.

Taiwanese marinated mince pork at Yuppie mom (£10)

I’ve been doing some research on Manchester’s Hong Kong food scene lately and what a joy it’s been. On one of my adventures, I walked to Lower Broughton to meet a friend at Hong Kong fusion caff Yuppie Mom and we ordered a bunch of dishes to share. There is a lot of Thai influence here and a braised beef curry fragrant with lime leaf was sensational but I adored this Taiwanese pork belly stew (aka, I think, lou ru fan). Sticky, sweet, salty, and Xmas-spiced with cinnamon, star anise and clove. It’s served with a halved tea egg and plain boiled rice, the ideal blank canvas. We ordered pan fried dumplings and crisp, fermented beancurd chicken wings on the side and had to take leftovers home in a tub. This place is ace.

Isle of Wight tomato at Northcote (part of a £59 four-course lunch menu)

I was fortunate to be invited to have lunch at Northcote this month and I jumped at the chance. I’m going to write a bit more about the experience (and how affordable it is for Michelin dining) in another article but let’s give this dish the spotlight for now.

I absolutely LOVE Isle of Wight tomato season. My countertop is overflowing with blighters of all shapes and sizes in the summer. But I can’t do anything quite as impressive as this with them. The thing I love about Lisa Allen’s menus is that the produce is always the star. So yes this dish had a pretty gem of goats cheese ice cream dusted with onion ash. Yeah, it featured acidulated watermelon and a little crispy coral thing somehow made out of tomato. But unlike some places I could mention, nothing felt like unnecessary showboating. No turning something inside out with a load of technical processes and somehow rendering it less delicious than in its original form. No. Here the flavours come first and the prettification and skill are used with confident restraint. Very mindful. Very demure.

Sweetcorn pork rice (AKA Show Me Your Love Friend) at Happy Valley (£11.50)

The words Happy Valley strike fear into the hearts of anyone who’s watched the series and this Happy Valley is unnervingly close to Strangeways prison. But thankfully its nomenclature refers to the high-end horse racing venue in Hong Kong rather than anything sinister. There’s nothing sinister about it, in fact. On our visit, the place was packed full of chattering families and friends wolfing down bible-thick French toast like there’s no tomorrow. So I felt very much at home and among my people.

The couple on the next table told us they’d come over from Huddersfield and were very keen to talk to me about all their favourite dishes from their motherland (Hong Kong not Hudds). We had already ordered an eclectic mix of beef brisket noodles, satay all-sorts, and this hug-in-a-mug pork and sweetcorn dish. To my inexperienced palate, it sits somewhere between chicken and sweetcorn soup and congee. The kind of thing you eat slowly and savour. All soft edges and gentle simplicity, I loved it. I wasn’t quite as enamoured with a side dish of a whole boiled iceberg lettuce with an oyster sauce dip (described as ‘boiled vegetables’ on the menu) but you’ve got to get your greens in any which way, I suppose. I’ll still be back for more food here, I’ll just maybe get spam, eggs and toasted warbies on the side like everyone else.

Garam masala labneh, fenugreek-chilli butter, spiced chickpeas, flatbread at Caravan (£11)

I went with my friend, the brilliant writer and wit Lucy Tomlinson, to the launch of the Manchester branch of London's hit coffee shop/all-day diner Caravan. It’s opened just around the corner from Aviva Studios and a stone’s throw from Fenix in the artsy and up-market area we are to call The St John’s district. It’s still a bit of a building site around there but it’s going to be gorgeous when everything is fully open. Caravan will be a very welcome new lunch spot for those who live and work near there.

I’ve probably eaten everything on the menu at this point, having visited three of their London branches and this new Manchester one. This dish is one of my big faves. A soft flatbread is served with a generous schmear of turmeric-tinted labneh, a tumble of crispy spiced chickpeas, spiced pink onions and coriander confetti.